


Red Flowers, Burning Winds

by tehtarik



Category: Mortal Engines (2018)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, every fucking thing I write is about loss and grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 22:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19160473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: Sometimes, in Hester’s half-sleep when her limbs are leaden as coal scuttles and her thoughts are arrows strung on bows but never released, she suspects that Anna never really fell, that the infamous scarlet aviator coat was wrapped around nothing, a rag spun into a steaming abyss.Nobody comes back from the Sunless Country.





	Red Flowers, Burning Winds

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the 2018 movie, mostly. I read the books, but I'm that fool who prefers the movie to the books. Also, Tom/Hester in the movie was more tolerable than the books. And I can't stomach how Anna Fang's character was treated in the books. I. Just. Cannot.

Go, Anna Fang says, and Hester goes. She breaks away from the sizzling dashboard and makes for the cathedral doors. She doesn’t actually see Anna fall off the upper level of St. Paul’s into the lightning-slashed smoke of MEDUSA’s rupturing machines.

Sometimes, in Hester’s half-sleep when her limbs are leaden as coal scuttles and her thoughts are arrows strung on bows but never released, she suspects that Anna never really fell, that the infamous red aviator coat was wrapped around nothing, a rag spun into a steaming abyss.

After all, didn’t Valentine open her up when he stuck his dagger into her stomach? He cut her open and he cut her loose. He let her out in a red spray of wind and of course she took flight.

 

\---

 

Tom and Hester don't turn the _Jenny_ around when London finally breaks down, the caterpillar treads grinding to a halt as flames spurt free from the maze of furnaces lining its Gut. They don't stay to watch the deckplates push apart tectonically; they don't stop for the evacuation klaxons howling through London's seven tiers, the slow crawl of its residents descending into the ruins of the Shield Wall, and then climbing the rubble to the gateway of the vertical city of Batmunkh Gompa.

"Let's go," says Hester. "We've done all we can."

Tom veers the _Jenny_ away and they fly over Batmunkh Gompa with its gardens and shrines and elevator baskets, avoiding the remnants of the city's air fleet on patrol.

A voice crackles on the radio. " _Jenny Haniver_? Is that you, Anna?"

Tom turns to Hester, her face still smeared with soot and tears from grappling with Valentine. He mouths at her as the thought suddenly occurs to him. _Anna?_

She shakes her head. Tom looks stunned, as he speaks into the mouthpiece, “This is the _Jenny Haniver_. Sorry to report, but Anna Fang is--”

Hester crosses the flight deck with one bound and yanks the mouthpiece from him, slams her hand somewhere on the bank of controls, in an attempt to flip one of the many switches to disengage the radio.

Tom looks aghast at her rage, but when she speaks, her voice is placid. “Don’t talk to them. They’re still Anti-Tractionists and you’re still a Londoner. They’ll think we’ve killed their beloved leader.”

“Then we should clarify what happened! We should talk to them like civilised people. Don’t you think they have the right to know?”

“You’re not going to get a thank you from them,” she says. “World doesn’t work like that.”

“That’s not what I--”

“We should go.” She turns her back on Tom, the best way to cut him down.

They go. They fly for days, just the two of them on the bird roads. The _Jenny Haniver_ glides through the skies of Anna's country, interrupted by jagged peaks caped with long shreds of snow.  They fly over the pale beryl of mountain lakes, small as puddles caught in the crooks of giant elbows of rock. In this world above the clouds, the days are marked by the harsh tides of light. Swift, unflinching sunrises escalating into the intense whitewash of noon. And sunsets. Sunsets are a violence of red flowers and burning winds.

Tom points things out to Hester: mountain peaks and other airships and the remains of static settlements that froze over during some long winter or other. Yawning doorways, collapsed roofs, knotted debris and bricks from avalanches past. Dead towns, because they couldn't or wouldn't move to areas of milder climates.

He flies the _Jenny_ like he owns it, probably does own it now.

“Anna told me to take care of her,” he says, running a hand over the steering as he swings around in the swivel seat. “So I will.”

“Good on you.” Hester gnaws down on the jealous retort that wants to escape her.

“I can teach you how to fly it,” he offers. He waves at the dashboard of levers and gauges and dials, the controls for altitude, engine power, the gas valves, swivel direction of the pods, speed, the gun turrets. “The basics at least. You can steer her for a bit once we clear these mountain ranges.”

She shakes her head, pretends to laugh. Tom has been good to her so she’ll hold her patience for now. “You know I’ll be no good at it.”

“It’s not hard. I’ll show you how to plot a course in the navigation system and set the autopilot to take care of the everything.”

“I’d rather not.” To make up for her shortness and the momentary hurt flashing across his expression, she adds, “Maybe sometime later. I can’t do much now.”

Tom thinks he understands, but of course he doesn’t. He rises from the pilot’s seat to where she’s leaning against the wall of the flight deck. She can lean into him if she likes, fit the side of her face against his neck, dig her chin into his shoulder. And maybe that would be nice, have somebody hold her without speaking, a brace of a body, while she imagines different arms around her, different sleeves, a different coat and collar to press her face to.

But then he goes and touches the scar on her face. His finger is a feather tip on her skin, but she jerks away. Her own hand flies to her scar, retracing the vicious flight of Valentine’s knife from her chin to eyebrow: slicing through the plump tissue of her lip and her nose and shredding her eyelid.

“I”m sorry,” Tom blurts out, mortified. “But your scar -- it's a part of you and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I just want you to know that. You’re extraordinary, did you know?”

“Don’t,” she says, and wisely, he shuts up.

 

\---

 

 

Sometime during their journey to the Shield Wall of Shan Guo, Anna Fang set the _Jenny_ to self-pilot on the pre-mapped route, left the controls in the flight deck, and came to sit beside Hester on the bunk.

“You mind moving over a bit?” Anna said. Her bare shoulder brushed against Hester’s. In the dim light, Hester could make out the wingtip of a tattoo, edging past the hem of Anna’s chainmail shirt. The contact against Anna’s shoulder and skin, against the tip of that wing, was unsettling.

She shuffled over a little. Just a little. “Sure. It’s your bed.”

Tom was all rugged up on the spare bunk above them, sheathed into such a deep sleep that Hester couldn't hear him breathe.

“City boy sure sleeps soundly, huh?” Anna was smiling. “Just like a city boy who thinks nights are safe and sound for all. Just like a Londoner, I should say.”

“He hasn’t been away from London before.”

“First time his London shoes touched bare dirt, then.”

The impulse to laugh was strong and a shock. But she didn’t laugh. How could she? Shrike was dead. Airhaven, where they’d just come from, was all but destroyed. She could still smell burning aviation fuel, the gasbags exploding, the walkways and buildings turning into passageways of flame. Airships splintering away from the tiers of air-quays, wheeling like frightened birds in the sunset.

Anna leaned forward, bringing her face close to Hester’s thigh, still bandaged. “How’s the wound?”

Hester remembered her own astonishment, being aboard the _Jenny Haniver_ for the first time, thinking that she and Tom were being abducted by a dangerous Anti-Tractionist. Instead, Anna Fang had treated her, spraying an icy coagulant over the gash on the thigh, caused by a glancing blow from a scav suburb’s harpoon. Later, Anna had checked the injury again, cleaned it and applied a fresh bandage.

“I can hardly feel it. You’ve fixed it.”

“Good.”

Anna’s hand was suddenly an inch away from Hester’s face, hovering above her scar. She couldn’t help it; she flinched. The same old self-consciousness struck her.

“Am I allowed?” said Anna. There was laughter in the creases around her eyes, like an inside joke that she wouldn’t share.

Hester nodded, still guarded. Anna cupped Hester’s chin with one hand, tilted it to yield full view of that grisly scar, and with her other hand, gently ran her thumb over the pink ruck of flesh. Hester’s fist tightened. Her throat was full, and when she swallowed, air felt like a rock scraping down her windpipe. But nothing happened. Anna let go and that was that. They were back to sitting on the bunk side by side, leaning against the wall. The silence was dissatisfying.

“How well did you know my mother?” Hester said.

“Well enough.” When Hester raised an eyebrow in query, Anna added, “Better than well. I visited her often, though once Valentine started coming, I stopped seeing her.” She exhaled. “Now I wish I hadn’t. She did write to me, though, telling me all about you after you were born.”

There were many things she remembered about her mother, but Anna Fang was not something Pandora Shaw had ever shared with her.

Anna got up and went rifling under the bunk, shuffling things around, opening and closing lids. Tom mumbled in his sleep. When she came back, she had an unadorned metal box, which she set on Hester’s lap.

“All the letters Pandora Shaw wrote me in the last ten years before she died, the ones I got, at least. Postal service isn't the most accurate on the bird roads and I never really had a fixed address, what with running all those missions for the Anti-Tractionists.”

Hester gripped the box tightly. She flicked the catch and lifted the lid. There was a stack of papers there, folded in half and tied with a length of string. Supposedly all of them written by her mother. She snapped the lid back down.

“I buried Pandora in her own garden when I found her,” Anna continued. “But I wish I’d been just a few hours earlier. Even if I couldn’t save her, at least I would have found you.”

It was because of Shrike. Shrike had picked her up, half-drowned in a nearby swamp and carted her off, away from her mother, away from the approaching wings and engines of the _Jenny_. What would it have been like if it was different hands that picked her up, that healed her face, and flew her away? She would never know. For a moment, all she felt was rage towards Shrike. When the wave of anger passed, her chest was hollow and there were tears in her eyes. She felt light as a gas cell, cheated of a different life. Not for the first time.

“Hey, hey, Hester Shaw,” said Anna, and with her fingernail, skimmed off a tear before it left Hester’s eyelashes and flicked it away. She kissed the side of Hester’s head, her lips warm against the top of that sickening scar. Hester leaned more boldly into Anna, cheek against skin and the metal of Anna’s shirt. “So you’re like me, huh? Then you’ll be okay.”

That was all that happened.

 

\---

 

“You don’t have to wear that around me,” says Tom. "I promise you I'm fine with - with every part of you."

In response, Hester pulls the knot tighter, pushes her scarf higher up her partially collapsed nose. If only she can breathe in the red of this scarf. If only she can take this colour into her lungs.

 

\---

 

When they’ve had enough of mountains and the desperate little settlements studding the slopes and valleys of the glacial landscape, Tom turns the _Jenny_ around in a wide hopeless arc. They swing north towards the serrated edge of the Ice Wastes, bypassing the Shield Wall and Batmunkh Gompa, before heading south again, across the Great Hunting Ground.

Traction cities crawl below them, haloed with violet and grey smog, the earth rutted and crossed and scribbled by their tracks. Even from up above, Hester can smell the burning fuel. Sprawling urbivores, many-tiered metropolises engulfing exhausted suburbs. Half-starved mining towns creaking along the stripped earth, burrowing for ore.

Sometimes they dock at these cities for supplies. They use Anna’s money to buy what they need. They sleep on Anna’s bed. They learn Anna’s ways, her old routes, read the maps that she kept in tins in her many overhead lockers. They find a piece of Old Tech with a few buttons and a battery inside, which Anna must have used to record her voice. Hester shuffles through the record of a conversation between Anna and her old friends: there is Captain Khora’s gruff tone and Sathya’s high-pitched exclamations. They’re all speaking in Airsperanto, which she doesn’t understand, and they must have been sharing a joke, because all three voices break and tangle and spasm into laughter. The feeling grips Hester’s gut with jealousy and a fresh wave of resentment.

Tom starts doing short-haul delivery runs along air traders’ routes. Everytime they dock somewhere, he strikes up conversations with merchants at inns, or in trading shops, offers to run their errands for payment. They begin flying longer journeys, all across the Great Hunting Ground, from town to suburb to conurbation and even a static settlement here and there. Eventually they cross the dusty, ancient blue of the Atlantic, making their way to the ziggurat cities of Nuevo Maya.

One night, Hester curls up in Anna’s bunk, but sleep is a stupid, slippery thing. She gets up and climbs a stout ladder, pushes through a hatch and sits there on top of the gondola, among the steel and glastic framework of the _Jenny_ , the gas cells hissing in the scarlet silicon-silk envelope. The twin Jeunet Carot engines fill her with their humming. This was Anna Fang’s whole world, and yet all that droning does for Hester is rattle about in the vast cavity of her chest, filling her with echoes that don’t die. This is all she imagines herself to be: empty housing, enclosing the ghost of an engine.

 

\---

 

 

She learns to manoeuvre some of the airship’s controls after all; Tom teaches her with enormous and tentative patience.

At least he gets the chance to sleep now while she takes her turn in the the flight deck.

They fly without stopping for over fourteen hours one day, delivering a cache of goods from a merchant in Benghazi to a client in Dun Laoghaire. They dock at Bordeaux-Mobile for the night, at the air-harbour below its vineyard tiers, but before Tom can lay down to rest, Hester knocks him to the wooden floor of the gondola, tugs at his fleece-lined jacket and the buckle of his pants.

“Hester--,” he starts to say but she pushes her fingers into his mouth.

She straddles Tom and pins his shoulders to the ground, ignoring his weak attempts to lift his head and reach her lips, kiss her. She pulls off the red scarf, letting him look at that ugly ridge fragmenting her face. His eyes are closed the entire time. He breathes hard and writhes and bucks, and when he moans, he mangles her name into a sibilant mess.

Later, when he spoons her, kissing her shoulders and unknotting her hair with his gentle fingers, she imagines another body behind her. Someone not as tall as him but just as lean, just as hard. Smaller hands, rougher fingers, shorter hair, someone with a smile half a world away and yet tender enough, someone who looks her in the eye while they fuck.

 

 

\---

 

 

As they flew toward London after MEDUSA’s first blast pulverised a chunk of the Shield Wall, Anna looked up from her controls at Tom and Hester, who were bracing against the side of the gondola, holding on to a stanchion.

“You tell me to turn around,” she said, her eyes on Hester only, “and I will. For you. I’ll drop you both somewhere safe and I’ll carry on myself. You may have to take the parachutes, though.”

Hester opened her mouth to tell Anna to say yes, turn the _Jenny Haniver_ around, get as far as fucking possible from London and Valentine, fly back over the Shield Wall and never stop until they were far away from everything.

But instead: “I can’t. I’ve got to go on.”

“Thought so.” Anna pulled the throttle lever down, flipped a switch and brought the _Jenny_ low, even as London’s beacons of searchlights arced across the night sky and its gun turrets opened fire at the Anti-Tractionist airfleet behind them.

“We can get to MEDUSA together,” Tom shouted over the explosions as London’s missiles slammed into the rocky hills on either side of them.

“I need to do this on my own,” Hester said.

Anna fixed her last lopsided smile at Hester. There was almost a wink there, in the rawboned half of her face before the shadows rescinded the rest of her into silhouette.  “Then I’ll give you all the time I got left, Hester Shaw.”

“And what about you?”

Anna Fang, aviatrix and Anti-Tractionist, cranked the _Jenny_ ’s steering so the airship slid port-side, dodging a volley of fire from London’s cannons, the barrels swivelling madly in their emplacements to lock onto them.

“I’m afraid the sun don’t shine where I’m about to go.”

 

\---

 

Nobody truly returns from the Sunless Country.

 

\---

 

The cold clips Hester’s ears when she steps out onto the narrow observation platform at the back of the _Jenny_ ’s gondola. Tom is at the flight deck, humming a song to himself, something he’d heard from a musician at a trader’s inn. The Jeunet Carot engines rattle through her bones, the envelope vibrating with its sighing gas, stretched over the foldable wings.

She leans on the railing, waiting for the sunrise. The stars are still out and about, and among the sandy spirals of their constellations, are the bright sharp-toothed gleams of the Old Tech orbitals of ancient civilisations, still dangling in space.

In her hands, Hester unties the bundle of letters her mother had supposedly once written to Anna Fang. She had meant to open them and read them one day. She really did.

But instead she lets one letter go and it flaps away, a birdless wing. She shreds the second one and it drifts like volcanic ash. The third flies into one of the engine pods and the last traces of both Pandora Shaw and Anna Fang turn to confetti. All of the letters leave her hands unread.

Dawn curves upward from the horizon, the bluish edge of night crackling into cantaloupe. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country. The bird roads are as empty as a red coat falling into smoke.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.  
> I'm @anagrammaddict on tumblr


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